


Old Sun

by crowleyshouseplant



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Jedi: Fallen Order (Video Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-25
Updated: 2020-07-25
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:29:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25499110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowleyshouseplant/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: Cere has a journey of her own on Ilum.
Relationships: Cere Junda/The Force
Comments: 1
Kudos: 11





	Old Sun

Cere had not been to Ilum since...

Since she had been one of the Jedi to accompany younglings, eager for their rite of passage, eager for the signature weapon of the Jedi. 

She closed her eyes. The holomap on the Mantis flickered and shimmered, a map to everything she desperately wanted, a reminder of what she had lost. She breathed deeply. Greez was cooking something, one of the meats vacuum sealed and packed for long space voyages. Technically, didn't need cooking but tasted much better when the tough bits soaked up a little sauce, and seasoning went a long way. Green things Cal brought back with him grew in the terrarium. In the back, where Cal had decided to take up his daily meditations, away from life on the Mantis, whispered to her, something she could still hear over the storm on Ilum as it raged and raged and raged.

Trilla had been one of the younglings she had accompanied. Trilla had disappeared into the caves after the ice melted, confident and sure that she would find her crystal. She was not the first to return, nor was she the last. Her eyes appeared slightly older, her mouth a little tight where once there had been easy laughter and quick smiles. Such was the way of Ilum. A crystal sat in her open palm, and she offered it to Cere for final approval. The crystal sang, and Cere remembered the harmony her own crystal offered in return, from the vault of her own lightsaber.

She had not thought of this in a long time. Her pulse quickened as she rose to her feet, walking circles around the ship while Greez watched her, uncharacteristically silent. Perhaps, in some way, he understood that this place was sacred--still sacred.

She glanced out the cockpit window. Did the planet know? Did the planet realize?

She pressed her palm to the glass. It was cold, but not cold like the Fortress or the hand that had forced her to--to--

Master Mace Windu's talent had been identifying shatterpoints. If the Order had not fallen, if the Clone Wars had not been fought, would the kyber crystals still sing to those to whom they belonged, or was that destiny shattered forever? Was the storm the culmination of that song, transformed to screams of grief and rage and agony?

Her heart cracked into another piece as she withdrew her hand. She pulled on a warm poncho, one of many that Cal seemed to collect, and told Greez she was going out. 

"Out there?" he asked unnecessarily.

She did not reply. The cold seeped through the fabric and settled on her skin the moment she stepped off the ship. She knelt in the snow, her knees growing damp, and making her even colder. 

But the cold grounded her. Centered her. Her thoughts edged towards memory she had cut from her since that day she had seen Trilla become the result of Cere's own treachery. Some masters lost their padawans even before the Clone Wars. Most times to illness. But then, the Clone Wars had come. She had been one of the masters sent to the arena. Trilla had not come--Cere had forbidden it. So many had died that day, masters and padawans and knights. Master Windu's lightsaber, aglow in purple, a beacon as it lit the way to either execution or war--an impossible choice, a shatterpoint. Master Windu had not been the same after that day. None of them were. Nightmares of the arena used to haunt her--until Order 66. Until she had been captured and tortured. Until she had betrayed her padawan, and opened the way for her become an Inquisitor instead of the Jedi Knight she knew she could be.

Her hands clenched in the snow. 

Her breath came out in clouds of cold. 

When she opened her eyes, something sparkled in the distance, which was strange because the storm still howled the planet's grief--her grief, and there was no sun. Not even snow blinded her.

She stumbled to her feet, even though her toes were numb. She covered her face with a corner of poncho and wandered toward the glimmer, ice crunching beneath her boots.

The Jedi believed that when a person died, they entered the Force, and were never truly gone but were transformed and renewed. But she had not felt them, even before. She had only felt the loss ripple through the Force, falling to her knees from the horror, only just barely bringing up her lightsaber in time to deflect the bolts that were supposed to take her from those she was charged to protect.

She had not felt them, not then, not ever, and not since. Only the loss kept consuming the ground beneath her feet, until she fell and fell and fell, the grief fracturing her heart until it cracked in pieces. The cold emanating from him until he broke her, until there was only the truth and her padawan, whom he took from her like death, until all that remained was a shell that had once been a person, that had once been Master Jedi Knight Cere Junda.

Cere Junda who had flown in formation with Adi Gallia. Master Kenobi had brought word of her death--his hologram flickering like her heart and her resolve.

She had comforted Master Secura when Master Kenobi had been sent to battle the Separatists on Ryloth, her home world, the one she had known before the Temple.

Cere had come to Master Unduli when she sat alone, mourning the decisions of her padawan Barriss Offee. They sat together, hand in hand, looking out at the sun setting on Coruscant, lights so bright they could not see the stars. It had been easy to dismiss Barriss's declarations that they were an army fighting for the Dark Side up until the very end, when it had been too late to turn back and choose another path, because they were dead or dying. Even in the cold, Cere could still feel Unduli's clammy hand in hers. Tears, echoes of Unduli's silent weeping, fell on her cheeks and dripped to the snow, freezing into icy fractals. 

_Did I not teach her well?_

Unduli had turned to her, the question whispered between them, heart to aching heart as Unduli gripped Cere's hand as if they themselves were about to fall from the high temple walls.

 _You did_ , Cere had assured her, bending her forehead to Unduli's. _You did_. _You did. You did._

Cere lifted her head, bracing against the wind, screaming with snow and cold and memory, howling in her ears: _you did_.

Who had betrayed whom first? The senators to their people? There had always been a sheer slide of cold in Secura's eyes when she entered the senate chambers to hear Orn Free Taa speak. 

Or was it the Jedi Council to their masters, their knights, their padawans by allowing them to serve in the war? Allowing their padawans to be turned over to the republic for justice? Well she had understood Skywalker's dedication to prove Padawan Tano's innocence. Well she had understood Padawan Tano rejecting the offer of knighthood to leave the Order.

Often Cere had wondered if that had been enough to save her, but she did not know what had happened to Tano, only that in the aftermath of that event, she had sworn that she would stand by Trilla no matter what. She had asked Trilla in the days after if she had questions, if she had doubts. She had even shared that sometimes--sometimes she also was not sure, and they shared their uncertainty in their sideways glances, as they fought side by side, beside clones in painted armor, knowing this was the only life they had ever had, they were ever supposed to have--and wasn't there something wrong with that? Something horrific that they had been created--for this?

How could she be part of it? How could she have led Trilla down this path? Had her betrayal began before she had ever realized? 

More and more, as sleep eluded her, the battle screams a constant memory, a constant ache, she resolved to ask Master Yoda the next time they were at the Temple to no longer send her and Trilla to the front lines. They could stay in Coruscant. They could aid the refugees there. They could do more and better at home, couldn't they? 

They could remember when the lightsaber was more than just a weapon, but a dance. Barriss Offee had regularly danced with her lightsaber, even well into the war. No one could remember when she stopped. 

The shimmer in the snow was closer now, and Cere paused, despite the wind that ran through her, despite the cold, despite the chill that numbed her skin. Her teeth chattered, and she rubbed her forearms to warm them. 

She had not thought of her days as a Jedi at the temple for so long. It was as if the dam she had carefully constructed was eroding at the force of memory attempting to flow through her. For so long, she did not think she had the strength to bear them. That she would drown beneath them, succumb to the anger and the hate and the fear, like before. 

She thought again of Master Unduli, their heads against each other, hand in hand. Far away, she could hear Master Yoda intone, _Luminous beings are we--not this crude matter_. She shut her eyes against the wind, the cold, the Fortress rising so tall above her, entombing her so that she might rise an Inquisitor, as one of them to hunt the Jedi down and destroy what remained--to destroy those who could come again. They had succeeded. They had Trilla. Because of her.

Her face crumpled as she neared the glimmer, her hands digging in the snow until it found something hard and smooth and her own. She could hear the crystal call to her own heart. The snows brought Master Unduli's whisper, shared with her padawan deep in the caves of Ilum a long time ago: _The crystal is the heart of the blade. The heart is the crystal of the Jedi. The Jedi is the crystal of the Force. The Force is the blade of the heart. All are intertwined. The crystal. The blade. The Jedi. You are one_.

"Luminara!" she cried out as she held the crystal to her heart, half expecting it to melt to ice in her palms, but also not surprised when it did not.

But Luminara Unduli was gone. Her padawan was lost, just as Trilla was lost, taken from her. Sobs bent her double, and then to her knees, as she clutched the crystal, the crystal that had once been hers, the crystal that she had sold because she was not worthy of it anymore, because another had been in need, and she had nothing left to give but what remained of her life. But the crystal had found its way home so that it might be there, waiting for her to return when she was ready because she had already faced the Dark Side. She would need to face it again and again because it would never truly be gone. It was a choice. It was always a choice.

Her tears froze as she raised her face to Ilum's sky. She reached out her hand so the snow flurries danced between her fingers. She could not change the past. She could only live in the present, in the now. She spoke through her weeping. Her voice was a trembling, new born thing. "The Force is with me." She struggled to her feet. "I am one with the Force." She raised her other hand, the one that clutched her crystal. Again, she gasped, "The Force is with me." She daubed at her eyes with the corner of Cal's poncho. "I am one with the Force." Both hands raised, crystal glinting like a promise between her fingers, she shouted, her voice flying with the storm, "The Force is with me! And I am one with the Force!"

The Force flowed through her like rivers from melted ice. Somewhere, deep in the mountains, Cal held his own crystals, cracked in two like both their hearts. The light refracted through them, a cascade of color she could feel if not see though her own crystal prismed in her hand.

The storm of Ilum brought another prayer upon its wind: _there is heat in breath and life_. 

Warmth flooded through her. Her heart beat with its rhythm as she held her hands out to the sky. Chills stilled beneath her skin, and she turned back towards the shadow of the Mantis. The snow had wiped away her footprints, but she knew the way back. She glanced down once more at the unassuming, simple crystal in her palm, before she tucked it in a pocket against her chest, where it could feel the new patterns of her changed and broken heart. "I am the one with the Force," she whispered as she walked. "And the Force is with me."

**Author's Note:**

> https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sunset_Prayer_of_the_Guardians_of_the_Whills


End file.
